S. Korean delegation to attend N. Korea's Isang Yun festival amid nuclear chill

A South Korean delegation left Monday for North Korea to attend its annual festival honoring the composer Yun Isang, with the scale of the visit drastically reduced due to the North's claimed nuclear bomb test, organizers said.

The 21-member group, much smaller than initially planned, flew to Pyongyang via Beijing, said the Isang Yun Peace Foundation that organized the trip. The renowned conductor Chung Myung-whun and some 40 other musicians and scholars cancelled their participation as tensions have escalated from the nuclear test the North claimed to have conducted on Oct. 9.

"Chung has been waiting for 20 years to conduct in Pyongyang and for inter-Korean music exchanges, so he doesn't think it is the right time to do that at this sensitive time," his manager Chung Myeong-geun said in a previous conversation.

Chung, now with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, had been scheduled to conduct North Korea's top orchestra in a performance of works by Beethoven.

The delegation included former Foreign Minister Han Seung-joo, Yoon Man-jun, chief executive officer of Hyundai Asan, a North Korea business arm of Hyundai Group, and Park Jae-gyu, former unification minister and leader of the Isang Yun foundation in Seoul.

The annual festival will mark the 89th anniversary of the birth of Yun Isang (1917-1995).

Yun, who expressed the glory and pain of the Korean people through Western instruments, was born in South Korea but spent most of his life in Germany and was more recognized in the North and Germany than in the land of his birth.

After visiting Pyongyang in the 1960s, he was listed as a communist spy by the South Korean government and arrested on trumped-up charges. Even though he was released on international appeals, musical circles continued to treat him as an outcast. The North, meanwhile, warmly welcomed him and named its best orchestra after him.

North Korea has held annual festivals for him during the past 25 years. His hometown, Tongyeong, inaugurated one in 1999.

Seoul, Oct. 16 (Yonhap News)